Fitzgerald's Lost City

Fitzgerald's Lost City Stephen L. Tanner Brigham Young University "Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether Fm a character in one of my own novels," Fitzgerald once remarked to a friend.1 We sometimes experience a similar difficulty in distinguishing Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda from his characters, for the autobiographical element in his fiction is pervasive. And there is a corollary to this, natural enough when one stops to think about it, but which has been ignored: the fictional element in his autobiographical writing is significant.2 1 do not mean that he lied about his life in the usual sense of the word, but that he used devices of fiction such as selection, imagery, symbolism, and myth to shape and give substance to his autobiographical essays. The most notable example is "My Lost City,"3 in which he blends literary art with autobiography , as Thoreau and Whitman had done before him, to express his vision of American life and indeed of human life itself. In a remarkable way, displaying subtle and effective artistic strategy, "My Lost City" encapsulates his essential preoccupations and insights as a literary artist. The essay provides us with a fundamental paradigm for interpreting his fiction and helps us understand why it continues to be read, perhaps more now than ever. Before treating the essay itself, it is necessary to describe in a schematic way Fitzgerald's characteristic themes and attitudes. This will enable us to perceive more clearly how they are encapsulated in "My Lost City." Generalizing from his own experience, Fitzgerald once asserted that authors usually repeat themselves. They have two or three really significant experiences in their lives and retell in various disguises their two or three stories "maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen." He confessed that he worked 1.Quoted by Malcolm Cowley, "Third Act and Epilogue," The New Yorker, 30 June 1945, rpt. in Arthur Mizener, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 65. 2."My Lost City," the subject ofthis essay has been treated by biographers and critics only as a biographical document. I know of no literary analysis of it. 3.This essay was delivered to his literary agent in July 1932 but was not published until included in The Crack Up in 1945. It was to have appeared in Cosmopolitan. Fitzgerald's literary agent, Harold Ober, reported in abetter of 19 November 1936 that the magazine had suspended the series in which it was to appear but he had been assured the article would appear soon. It never did. Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., As Ever, Scott Fitz - : Letters Between F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Literary Agent Harold Ober 1919-1940 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1972), p. 285. 56ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW best when he faced the fact that all his stories were going to have "a certain family resemblance."4 His own two stories were actually two parts of a single larger story. Sometimes one part is emphasized , sometimes the other, and often they are blended. Combining two of his favorite words, I have labeled the first part Romantic Promise. By this term I wish to signify the complex of hope, dream, yearning, aspiration, expectation, anticipation, idealism, mystery, confidence, and future possibility characteristic of so many of his characters. I suppose it could be called the Gatsby complex. In his fiction, it is an instinct or gift for forward looking that fastens itself upon external symbols such as youth, wealth, the girl, and New York City. Since Romantic Promise always tends to outstrip reality, it leads inevitably to the second part of the story, a concomitant disillusionment that I denote, using a phrase from Frost's "Oven Bird," a Diminished Thing. I intend Diminished Thing to mean the unavoidable aftermath of Romantic Promise: hopes and dreams thwarted, the mystery and excitement become commonplace, the future devoid of expectation and possibility. The Diminished Thing takes many forms in Fitzgerald's fiction — indeed he was fascinated with exploring its many varieties and manifestations — but its typical versions are loss ofyouth, losing the girl or discovering she does not equal...